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Apple asks investors to block proposal to scrap diversity programmes

theguardian.com

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Re: Apple asks investors to block proposal to scrap diversity programmes

#81

Post by pavlov »

frowaway4anoday wrote: post #66
pavlov wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re talking about corporations, not political parties. If this enforcement to hire unqualified people is happening, surely there’s lots of evidence? Internal emails and messages regularly get released as part of lawsuits. There must be lots of cases where middle managers at Apple are complaining that they’re being forced to hire an unqualified person because of a top-down edict, as you say.

Some of us like our jobs too much to risk leaking these things from resourceful companies that can ruin away our lives in an instant. Might be going too far to say “unqualified”, but I have already seen “less qualified” changed to “meets the minimum requirements” specifically changed to push through some hires. I am not taking a stance, the hired still worked great, but decisions were made, calls were exchanged, inte…

Was your previous hiring process actually getting you “the best”?

In that case you’re much better at hiring than any corporation I’ve ever seen. I was at Facebook for several years, and the hiring process was 90% noise where everyone pretended very hard that it’s signal.

Re: Apple asks investors to block proposal to scrap diversity programmes

#82

Post by pavlov »

zo1 wrote: post #75
defrost wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can't explain why its predictable that lesbians --> failure.

Not OP, but that point has nothing to do with them being lesbians or females. That label distracts from the actual criticism and bias that sadly played a part. It could just as well have been "obese native americans with amputations" or "foreign born white dudes with Crohn's disease" or "pansexual blue-haired dance majors" or "three sons of Mayor Dalton that approves the fire department's budget". If that property ti…

You’re completely discounting networks, yet most of what people achieve comes through them.

Nobel physics prize winners in the 20th century were very often Jewish. And that’s neither evidence of bias for them in the award process, nor evidence of some kind of genetic superiority. The Jewish researchers just happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right networks and mentors.

Apply the same logic to the lesbian firefighters. Their leadership positions probably don’t have anything to do with either their genetics or any bias, but their personal qualities and their networks. Being a conspicuous “outsider” in the system may have helped them develop relationships and leadership skills.

Re: Apple asks investors to block proposal to scrap diversity programmes

#83

Post by geertj »

maxerickson wrote: post #74
geertj wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring will always have a subjective aspect to it, which is just the nature it. And I do agree that techniques like being conscious of bias and trying to interrupt it are useful. But yes, I do have an answer, which is that excluding factors that do not relate at all to job responsibilities is strictly better than including those, even if the result is still subjective.

Categorizing factors as not related to job responsibilities is also subjective! Of course it can often be easy to identify the most salient factors, but that doesn't make it a concrete activity.

Can I mathematically disprove that if I take the Lagrangian of the standard model and combine it with with Einstein's field equations, and chase down emergent complexity over many levels, that the properties that DEI selects for are actually what makes a great SDE (in my world)? No I cannot. But we're getting silly here.

I will settle for the most salient factors if that sounds more precise to you. I will interpret that as a large number of sigmas, but we don't have to agree on the exact number of sigmas here!

Re: Apple asks investors to block proposal to scrap diversity programmes

#84

Post by doublepg23 »

pavlov wrote: post #44
slt2021 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

enforced top-down from leaders and decision makers by the "commitment to diversity" and hiring of unqualified people based on diversity representation, not merit. the most recent example is Kamala Harris: she had the worst primary performance during 2020, but still was selected as VP by Biden and was nominated without primaries again in 2024. Her electoral results speak for DEI in general, when hiring decision is don…

We’re talking about corporations, not political parties. If this enforcement to hire unqualified people is happening, surely there’s lots of evidence? Internal emails and messages regularly get released as part of lawsuits. There must be lots of cases where middle managers at Apple are complaining that they’re being forced to hire an unqualified person because of a top-down edict, as you say.

The FAA has an ongoing class action lawsuit where they discriminated against qualified candidates on the basis of race using a newly implemented “biographical questionnaire” https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...

Re: Apple asks investors to block proposal to scrap diversity programmes

#85

Post by maxerickson »

slt2021 wrote: post #80
maxerickson wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Categorizing factors as not related to job responsibilities is also subjective! Of course it can often be easy to identify the most salient factors, but that doesn't make it a concrete activity.

are you making a claim that sexual identity and race (two most common DEI factors) are part of the job ? how is being a black lesbian part to any job whatsoever ?

No, I'm making a claim that a sloppy argument was made.

You are focusing on factors that you consider obvious, which is exactly my point, using your subjective judgement doesn't give you a framework that isn't subjective.

Re: Apple asks investors to block proposal to scrap diversity programmes

#86

Post by frowaway4anoday »

pavlov wrote: post #81
frowaway4anoday wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us like our jobs too much to risk leaking these things from resourceful companies that can ruin away our lives in an instant. Might be going too far to say “unqualified”, but I have already seen “less qualified” changed to “meets the minimum requirements” specifically changed to push through some hires. I am not taking a stance, the hired still worked great, but decisions were made, calls were exchanged, inte…

Was your previous hiring process actually getting you “the best”? In that case you’re much better at hiring than any corporation I’ve ever seen. I was at Facebook for several years, and the hiring process was 90% noise where everyone pretended very hard that it’s signal.

Definitely not! They let me in, after all, and I know where I’d fit in. Churn used to be high enough I believe they would expect to grind you out if you couldn’t do the work. It was very cruel.

I’d say the SNR was higher than -19dB, though (assuming we are using Volts on this shocking topic). You can’t target the best if you are not open to looking for them but instead start looking for people to make them your best. I think that this fit the overall company strategy pivot from one that encouraged “personal excellence by dealing with excellent people”, to one that pushed “managerial precision through finding acceptable cogs”. Im paraphrasing the exact phrase, but I think thats a fair interpretation.

These are not bad things, they are just the winds of change based on the lungs of whoever is in charge to think whats best for the company. Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it blows, sometimes it goes nowhere. The new approached allowed for different people to get lucky, different people to get ahead, and different people to start filling the hallways. Thats gotta be worth something, somewhere. People willing to try at this level deserve a chance, and it’s not my money, so why not.

What changed for me was that previously they could make a claim and cloak the results in facts (maybe because I believed it), but now they were looking to that tweak the claim so that it could be one where you could cloak the facts with results (and were asking me to do my part).

Part of this shift was warranted, part of it was appeasement, all if it felt like you’d just been served a bundled cable TV plan.

Re: Apple asks investors to block proposal to scrap diversity programmes

#87

Post by lupusreal »

machinekob wrote: post #3

DEI was so good and righteous idea that it shifted most of the western world to the right more than dozens of islamist terrorist attacks in previous decades. And ofc. all US corporations would follow this cultural change or they’ll risk antitrust/tax/law investigations from Trump and all EU government that’ll be elected in next few years.

Trump's administration proved ineffective last time and there's little reason to think it will be different this time. If he tries to sabotage companies for not abandoning DEI initiatives he'll be bogged down in the courts, it will take more than four years to resolve any of that and by then it will be moot anyway.

Insofar as companies are changing now it's because they no longer feel political pressure to put on performative displays to satisfy the sort of activist government regulators that were typical in the Obama and Biden governments. Companies like Apple which are true DEI believers and not merely bending to political pressure will keep their programs dispute Trump and Trump won't be able to much of anything about that.

Re: Apple asks investors to block proposal to scrap diversity programmes

#88

Post by mschuster91 »

inglor_cz wrote: post #29
mschuster91 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DEI means lowering standards to accomodate minorities and discrimination against more qualified white males Women are perfectly capable of working in firefighting, the military or police. I've personally seen a female police officer of barely 1.60m throw a drunk 2m Russian dude on a rampage in a bar fight onto the ground and tie him up alone , about a solid third of the volunteer force in my THW unit are women, a g…

Existence of some counterexamples does not upend the basic observation: that way, way fewer women are capable of carrying a 100 or even a 60 kg person out of a fire than men. Which makes efforts to recruit as many women into firefighting as possible a sad ideological travesty, and people are perfectly right calling it out. There is a difference between emancipation and group delusion. There are meaningful physical di…

> Existence of some counterexamples does not upend the basic observation: that way, way fewer women are capable of carrying a 100 or even a 60 kg person out of a fire than men.

My point is the need for this ability is next to zero because it is extremely dangerous, and yet women are judged by that on their inability to be a firefighter at all? That's bullshit, pardon my French.

> The vast majority of the really dangerous stuff in IDF is still done by men, not least because of the risk of rape when falling into hands of enemies.

A lot of the men that got taken hostage or got found dead on Oct 7 were raped as well. And yes, IDF tries to dissuade women from enemy-facing action, but if a woman decides she accepts this risk, she can go for any role she wants.

Re: Apple asks investors to block proposal to scrap diversity programmes

#89

Post by slt2021 »

maxerickson wrote: post #85
slt2021 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you making a claim that sexual identity and race (two most common DEI factors) are part of the job ? how is being a black lesbian part to any job whatsoever ?

No, I'm making a claim that a sloppy argument was made. You are focusing on factors that you consider obvious, which is exactly my point, using your subjective judgement doesn't give you a framework that isn't subjective.

You have constructed and debating a strawman.

Everything involving human judgement will be subjective, yet we still can distinguish between good and bad decisions and discuss tradeoffs about being less wrong while being subjective

Re: Apple asks investors to block proposal to scrap diversity programmes

#90

Post by geertj »

piva00 wrote: post #69
geertj wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP has no obligation to do a literature search for you. This is a discussion site, not a scientific journal, so it is okay to have opinions based on other sources, such as anecdotes from personal life, first principles, or common sense/intuition. Speaking of which, I see the same anecdotes that DEI policies pushed people to the right.

It's absolutely okay if it's framed that way in their original comment, which it wasn't and deserves push back unless they can sustain their argument. If it started with "in my opinion", "in my view" instead of a baseless factual statement. If not framed in that way then I will ask for sourcing the bullshit :) > Speaking of which, I see the same anecdotes that DEI policies pushed people to the right. Yeah, that's why…

It's okay to ask of course. My statement was that the ask does not have to be reciprocated.

Personally, unless there's specific claims about data proving something, I usually assume claims on discussion sites to be somewhat informed personal opinions, even if they are worded more strongly than this. I find this to be true more often than not. But I may be more skeptical than your average person regarding the scientific rigor in social sciences, as well as the ability of people to cherry pick specific papers that suit their claim, and therefore place less weight on literature citations versus experiences that I see in my daily life.

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